Lowland Gorilla - Take Your Painting from Boring to Bold

Have you ever looked at your painting and thought what can I do to amp this painting up? That is how I felt about this piece. My initial idea for painting this lowland gorilla was to use a palette knife and a  complimentary color scheme of turquoise and red knife painting, but I found like it was lacking something.  
I was really liking the knife texture to indicate the leathery skin of this beast but wasn't loving the color combination for this specific piece so I pulled out my basic paint program fooled around with some color using the value = color theory and flipped this painting on its head. 
I really love this painting now, it really pops off the canvas. How do you deal with dead paintings? 
This painting is available for sale www.eclecticstudio.ca